I enjoy making taking and making short videos. My kids are usually featured in the videos in one way or another. Last year we went on a month-long vacation to Vietnam and I recorded a huge number of raw videos. With so many raw takes to work with, using Windows Explorer and browsing around without some system of tagging, keyword searching, etc. becomes extremely tedious and unmanageable.

So I started to look for a way to manage/categorize all of these raw videos and I think I’ve found a pretty good and free solution: Picasa (from Google).

The current version of Picasa for Windows (version 3.8) allows you to specify titles for images and videos, as well as assigning various tags to them. The user interface is very user-friendly. And the actual searches are typical Google-lighting-fast.

What I do is I go through each raw video take, give it a title and assign some tags. Then later I am able to very quickly search for videos. For example, if I need a take involving a dolly pan to the right, I just type “dolly pan” into Picasa and instantly the takes with those keywords come up.